Memories of April 23, 2020
Continued from previous post here…
On April 23, my ultrasound appointment at the Maternal Fetal Medicine clinic in the Royal Alexandra Hospital was scheduled for 11:30AM. Brodi and I arrived early, making sure that we would have time to find parking. Due to covid protocols, Brodi was not allowed to come into the hospital with me. I walked in alone, and we decided that Brodi would wait in the car. Our previous ultrasound appointments had taken about 30 minutes to 1 hour, and we figured that this appointment would be no different.
Entering the hospital was strange. At the time, all the measures in place for covid were new and unexpected. We would later become very used to sanitizing, masking, and screening every time we entered the hospital. But at that time it felt like we had entered another world. Other places did not have mandatory masking mandates yet, and you could still enter the grocery store with a naked face. At the time, Royal Alex also had a protocol in place stating that any visitors to the hospital needed to be escorted to their destination within the hospital. After screening, I had to wait for a RAH staff member to come collect me and take me to the Maternal Fetal Medicine clinic (MFM). I could literally see the area that I needed to go to from the main entrance, but someone still had to walk me there. I suppose it was to ensure that people didn’t stray to other areas of the hospital, but it definitely made things a lot more difficult once Arden was born.
After arriving at the MFM and checking in, I was provided with a buzzer, much like the ones that they give you at Red Lobster when you’re waiting for a table to become available. The waiting areas were labeled, and you were required to sit in specific areas depending on which door you would be going through for testing. There were markings on the walls and chairs to encourage social distancing. After I checked in, there were only about 5 other women in the waiting area. I figured that it couldn’t be long before my turn would arrive. Turns out I was wrong. I waited for over two hours, and by the time my turn arrived, it was nearly 2PM.
In the ultrasound, the tech spent a lot of time taking very specific pictures and measurements. The exam took a lot longer than any of my previous ultrasounds had. At the time, I had developed extremely painful sacro-iliac joint pain due to Arden’s position, and laying on my back was often excruciating. This made me all the more impatient for the exam to be over. Partway through the ultrasound, the tech called in the doctor, and she spent a lot of time looking as well. There was a big screen that showed me what they were viewing, and I remember spending the whole time trying to decipher what they were looking at. Reading clues on the sides of the screen to guess with. It was mostly in vain, but it kept my mind somewhat occupied.
From there, I was led to a room where I had a non-stress test (NST) for the baby. It was such a small room, it honestly seemed like a storage closet. The machines inside had been haphazardly pushed into the room, and the chairs were squished in at odd angles. There were random papers lying around. I remember that the nurse who did my NST was so kind and bubbly, and for a brief time in that little room, she helped to ease my fears.
After the NST, I was told to wait in that room. I waited for a long time, and realized that I was extremely hungry. Throughout my pregnancy, I had developed gestational diabetes, and I did my best to follow a strict diet in order to maintain my sugar levels. That day, I hadn’t eaten since before our original appointment time, and I knew my sugar levels would be completely out of whack. I had packed a small bag of mixed nuts in my purse, and I remember sneaking those because I wasn’t supposed to be eating in that area.
When a doctor finally arrived to talk to me, she expressed her concerns from the ultrasound. She explained that the baby had two club feet, one with unidentified tissue on the bottom, which could potentially mean the foot had a rocker bottom. The baby’s femurs were quite short, which could be explained if I was a shorter woman, but seemed quite strange given that I’m not short. They could also see that the baby had a mega cisterna magna. The cisterna magna is the fluid space behind the cerebellum in the brain. Apparently the baby’s space was bigger than typical. The doctor expressed that all of these anomalies could lead to an underlying genetic condition or a neurological disorder, and that I would need further testing. While I was finding out all of these things, Brodi was still waiting in our car in the parking lot out front. I had to call him so that he could be on the phone and hear the information as the doctor was telling it to me. Even though he was on the phone, I remember feeling so alone and overwhelmed.
I spent a long time in that room conversing with that doctor. Afterwards, I was put on the phone with a genetic counselor, and Brodi was three-way called into the conversation. The genetic counsellor expressed that the anomalies they were seeing could lead to our baby having some sort of trisomy. However, they didn’t have an idea of a specific diagnosis based off of the findings they had so far.
Following the conversation with the genetic counselor, I was again told to wait. I waited for maybe 30 minutes or more, and was then escorted upstairs to have an MRI. They wanted to get another look at the baby’s brain following the discovery of the larger fluid space behind the cerebellum.
I’m not going to lie, the MRI was horrible. I had to lie completely still on my back, on a hard surface. I remember having to get the nurse and doctor to help me onto and off of the table, as my S.I. joint pain made it excruciating and nearly impossible for me to independently go from lying on my back to standing. During the MRI, I felt hugely pregnant, and incredibly claustrophobic. I had to hold my breath for many 30 second periods, because they wanted to see the baby’s body without the interruption of my breathing movements.
When the MRI was complete, I quickly got changed back into my clothes after having been provided a hospital gown for the exam. I was again escorted to another part of the hospital, where I had another non-stress test for the baby. During the test, the nurse asked me if I was feeling contractions. I replied no, and she explained that she could see some uterine action occurring. The doctors expressed the importance of us staying in the city until the baby would be born so that he/she could be delivered safely.
After the NST, I briefly met my new obstetrician. She was young, but I immediately felt confidence in her. Thank goodness for that, because within the next five minutes, I needed to sign my consent for her to perform my c-section. We didn’t yet know when the baby would be born, but we knew it would be some time within the week.
I left the hospital around 6:30PM. I was hungry, sad, and overwhelmed. Brodi picked me up at the front doors. I remember him getting out of the car and giving me a hug. He knew I was broken. We both were. Up until that point, it had been the hardest day we had ever faced. We drove back to our hotel feeling scared and uncertain for the future. We would spend the next few days cooped up in our hotel room, cycling between grief, shock, excitement, despair, and hope.
To be continued…